Atlanta Ga

You could call it the world's biggest open-mike night. Except the one going on in Atlanta this week will last 10 nights. When it's all over, 500 bands and solo artists -- representing genres as varied as rock, rap and bluegrass -- will have performed, in order, each of the 500 greatest songs of all time, as ranked by Rolling Stone magazine three years ago. It's a songfest aimed at raising money for camps serving children with special needs.

The armed barricades and daily bomb scares of last summer long have faded into memory but, just beneath the surface, Atlanta remains very much a city under siege. Four pipe bombs have exploded at three different locations here since July, striking targets as disparate as an outdoor concert, an abortion clinic and a lesbian-owned nightclub. And the FBI is warning minority communities that they could be targeted next should the perpetrators strike again.

Glenn Phillips can see it now--the hordes of hungry delegates and reporters beating a path to his restaurant when the Democratic National Convention comes to town next Monday. He's putting on 15 temporary workers to augment his regular staff of four, and he's planning to keep his doors open around the clock. The only thing disturbing that vision is the parking lot between his 124-seat restaurant, the Beef Station, and the main entrance to the sprawling Atlanta convention complex.

For years, George and Jean Brumley threw themselves into charitable works around this city as determinedly as they shunned public acclaim for their deeds. The community's gratitude poured forth Saturday as an estimated 3,000 mourners gathered in memory of the retired pediatrics chief and his philanthropist wife, who died July 19 in Kenya in a plane crash that also took the lives of 10 other family members and the two pilots.

The question was simple. Where are the next Olympics? And it seemed fair to be asking it of people in Catalonia, as the Olympics have been such a focus of attention here. So it was done, and this was the result: Heladio Garcia Enriquez of Barcelona, 40, a doorman: "I believe they are going to be in Montreal. Isn't that in the United States? I think it is either Atlanta or Montreal." Francisco Zuniga, 17, of Barcelona, a sales person: "I do not know."

Artist Sandra Rowe of Riverside, whose first solo show at a museum opened last month in Los Angeles, arrived here Thursday to take part in another first, the National Black Arts Festival. "I think the caliber of the music and dance portions of the festival are superb," Rowe said, "but it's the visual arts I'm most excited about seeing--the work of Elizabeth Catlett and Faith Ringgold. That's a lot of high-powered black art in one place."

We plopped down a six-pack of beer, domestic, and a small container of pasta salad on the liquor store counter in mid-town Atlanta and then stood back. We were two reporters, weary from our pre-Olympic wanderings, looking to quench a thirst and maybe nibble on some noodles. At what cost? The women at the cash register, obviously in training, rang up the total. "Twenty-one fifty six," she said. That was twenty one as in U.S. dollars.

The world is going to Atlanta this week. Streets will be full of people in caftans, fezzes, saris, muu-muus, berets, lederhosen, bowler hats and brollies, monks' robes and dashikis, all with large dictionaries, Baedekers and language translation books under their arms. Ready to say "Ou est la subway?" Or "Mach schnell, Carl Lewis!" or "Pajolsta," or "Which way to Peachtree Street?" They are in for a culture shock.

Operation Rescue ended its "siege of Atlanta" on Saturday, proclaiming success despite numbers of protesters being well short of its goal and promising to stage similar anti-abortion vigils at clinics across the nation in the coming months. In the culmination of six days of renewed protests, almost 250 anti-abortion demonstrators fanned out over the city, picketing and attempting "rescues" of clinic clients at four Atlanta abortion clinics and drawing 40 arrests.

Georgia political analyst Claibourne H. Darden Jr. explained all the hoo-ha about the newspaper in town this way: "This new editor is from the New York Times, and they were on the wrong side of the recent unpleasantness of 1861 to 1863." Talk radio host Tom Houck was more inflammatory. "These White Knights from the New York Times," he said on a recent program, stretching the words out like taffy to make his irony clear. "They're bad people. Bad people.